A technique for creating unique and interesting characters that makes their cultures more rich and detailed. Simple but comprehensive.

This image of a Mannequin in Ferengi Makeup and Uniform by Marcin Wichary from San Francisco, Calif. was first published on Flickr under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79570035.

I was reading something on Quora the other day about how Deep Space 9 used the overall concept of Ferengi Traits to make the personalities of Quark, Rom and Nog distinctive (and don’t worry if you don’t know who those characters are, it’s not important to the article).

The key point being proposed was that while all three fell into the general pattern of ‘Ferengi’, each had his own unique traits for which that general pattern provided context. Putting those together permitted an interpretation of those traits from the Ferengi perspective, which in turn broadened the perspective on that society from comic-book simplicity to rich and culturally-detailed.

To employ a metaphor, a spotlight on one of the characters reflected back on the overarching commonalities, exposing fresh facets of the collective generality.

My thoughts went immediately to the gaming applications. These are essentially the same thing, but four-fold. Racial, Archetypal, Cultural/Social, and Characteristic. Each of these represents a way of generalizing a character, and provides (through interpretation), specific traits that denote the individual personality.

Initially, I was focused on NPC delineation, because that’s always a topic of value to GMs, but then I realized that the same methods would work for PCs as well – and that a lot of advice offered both here and elsewhere over the years were already groping in this particular direction.

An introduction to the Architecture

I’ve tried very hard, in this article, to use different collective descriptions for each facet and sub-facet of a subject. This had two purposes – first, by using non-standard nomenclature, it invites readers to take a fresh look at a very familiar subject; and second, it helps keep it clear just what facet or sub-facet I’m talking about. The goal is to avoid boxing ourselves in with stereotypes while creating a broad range of end personalities within a particular culture of which the individual (and all other individuals) are collectively representative.

This matters because it transforms the personalities from something being dictated by rules narrative and cultural write-ups to a foundation for individuality – it lets individuals be unique while maintaining that cumulative impression.

And it matters because that’s how characters in-game would formulate their impressions of both an individual and of a collective grouping – they wouldn’t be given an overarching definition, they would be given stereotypes if they were told anything at all about the race /culture, into which they would have to ‘fit’ the individual, or – if told nothing about the race / culture – they would be presented with one or more individuals which they would have to then generalize into an overall impression.

In other words, this approach is both more akin to, and more facilitative of, the situation as it would be encountered in the real world. That makes this less work for the GM, allows more creativity, and produces more unique individuals.

Three Options and how to choose between them

GMs can either start with a generalized pattern as a structure, or let one emerge naturally as a collective impression created by a group of individuals. Or they can occupy a half-way house somewhere in between these two extremes, offering a broad summary as a guideline and content to extrapolate from that beginning for individuals, fleshing out the resulting general view one individual at a time.

There are two factors that should be considered when choosing between these three options. (1) How much contact has the society in general had with the race / species? This pushes toward the generalized pattern as foundation. And (2), how diverse are the race / species in personality, and within that question, how representative of their race / species does the GM want this individual to be? The second pushes toward the middle ground, while the latter goes further and promotes the emergent collective impression as the path to follow.

There’s even a variation on the half-way house in which the specific description is filled with half-truths and inaccuracies perpetuated through myth and legend and culture. The GM may not know what the truth behind this picture is, only that it’s partially accurate and partially invented or romanticized.

There should never be a forced ‘one size fits all’ answer to this question; it should be different each and every time – but, once made, it should remain in effect for each representative of a race / species until you have good reason to change it..

The Four Stanzas Of A Character

The general picture of an individual character, can be broken down into four stanzas. Four paragraphs / lines that collectively delineate an individual persona. Some GMs may add a fifth, alignment, but that’s fallen out of favor in gaming circles these days.

That redefines the objective – we want to end up with a four-to-eight-sentence summary of the individual and how he represents the broader culture from which he derives.

Before we can achieve that, we need to know the subjects of these four stanzas.

Racial Traits

These are the racial stereotypes that collectively apply in some manner to the normal individual – even if the individual is wildly different from them, they are still defined, in relative terms, to those racial traits. “The typical Orc is boisterous and brash, ill-mannered, and prone to violence, with a huge chip on their shoulders from being suppressed as a species, and as an individual within the species.” Right away, there’s a lot in that description that will seem familiar but there’s a nuance or two that are just a little different to the generic description of the race. It provides a subtle redefinition of the race, one that can manifest in different ways in every individual.

Archetypes

Similarly, in most RPGs there are archetypes – sometimes explicitly defined as character classes, sometimes not. Each archetype, in turn, carries baggage in the form of a description of the type of persona that it welcomes and develops, the personas that naturally ‘fit’ the archetype and how well-suited the individual is to their profession.

Social Class, Associations, and Faiths

These three are all ways that individuals associate with others, sometimes within their culture, and sometimes forming a point of connection with others beyond it. Each of them carries an expectation of behavior that forms part of the collective identity of the specific sub-group of which the individual is a member, and for that behavior to come naturally, those speak to the persona of the individual. On the other hand, if the individual rebels against one or more aspects of the group identification, that also says something about the personality of the individual.

There can be several such groupings to which an individual belongs, but one of them will always be dominant, and their response to that dominant grouping will be definitive, providing a guideline to how they integrate (and how well they integrate) with the other groups to which they belong. These other groups provide nuance, not definition. They can warrant a mention in this stanza only when it is culturally expected that this association is definitive – and in this individual’s case, it is not.

Characteristic Attributes

There are three different aspects of characteristics that shape an individual – those that are relatively high, those that are unrelentingly average (relative to those around him or her), and those that are notably lacking or low (same caveat). Each of these can form an important element of the individual persona or can be negligible. The latter should be ignored for now; it’s the former that we are interested in.

If the individual is notably stronger than those around them, this will have a profound influence on them, amplifying the consequences of some typical adolescent behaviors into life-altering events. Similarly, if they are faster, more nimble, more agile, more athletic, smarter, wiser, more attractive, or more resilient, there will be profound impacts that will push them either more firmly toward the stereotype, or more strongly away from it.

If the individual is notably weaker than those around them, or more foolish, or more stupid / easily led, less genteel, or more clumsy, these impacts will also be profound. Always being the last person picked for games or teams will amplify other attributes of the persona, and may even put the individual into situations that threaten their lives. Some may devote their lives to overcoming this handicap, no matter the cost; others will accept it and embrace another path through life.

It doesn’t matter how many characteristics the game mechanics define, there will always be more than can easily be accommodated in a short descriptive passage of the type being discussed here. Of necessity, you need to focus on the one, two, or (at most) three that are most definitive of the individual relative to the broader population around them.

I want to highlight something before continuing. I’ve made a big point of using terminology relating to racial / social expectations, for example, “relative to the broader population around them”, for three reasons.

First, it’s the relative value in comparison to those expectations that shapes a persona, not the absolute value;

Second, this accommodates circumstances of adoption / resettlement, in which the racial norms themselves deviate from the expectations of the society around the individual; and

Third, defining these attributes in relative terms means that the individual’s raw numbers can be filtered through the relative terminology to say something about the culture from which they derive.

The Process

With the subjects of each stanza now defined, we can move on to the process of generating an individual’s persona. For each of the Stanzas, this is a four-step process that is often conducted intuitively. As with most intuition-driven events, greater understanding and control can be achieved by understanding the process intellectually, and this can provide a road-map to follow when intuition fails us.

In fact, the four-step process is so quick (and usually easy) that we can contemplate far more than the four stanzas, and that creates a need for a fifth step, placed second-last, and labeled step 4:

1. Generic Trait to Profile Spectra
2. Individual Placement within Spectra
3. Alternative Interpretations & Adaptations of Individual Placements
4. Selection
5. Facets of Individuality from Specific Interpretations

Let’s briefly look at each of these in greater detail.

1. Generic Trait to Profile Spectra

I recently wrote, though I’m not sure where, “Nature doesn’t deal in absolutes, it deals in spectra”, or words to that effect – I think it might be in the Zenith-3 adventure currently being played.

Every element in the four stanzas can be viewed as a placement upon a general range of spectra that collectively define the application of the element to the collective identity of the race / species.

You can see this readily in the case of the characteristic attributes – the character has a specific value for each characteristic, while the full range of possibilities defines the scope of the spectrum from low-to-high. One of my very early advocacies, long before I started writing articles for Campaign Mastery, dealt with the spectrum of full possibilities permitted by the game mechanics and the placement of the individual upon that spectrum as a guide to personality traits.

In this case, the spectrum of possibilities is reduced to just those considered ‘valid’ for the race / species, permitting a socially-relevant measure of the impact of that placement, but the older interpretation still has some value in terms of defining the significance of those racial restrictions relative to the human population base.

If the human range is 3-18, for example (very traditional D&D scale), an individual value of 15 give rise to certain character traits (depending on which characteristic is being discussed). If the race in question has a spectral range of 12-20, the 12 tells you something about the race relative to humans, as does the 20, and the individual’s value of 15 tells you something about where they fit within that 12-20 spectrum of possibilities.

Set aside the individual value of 15 for the moment, though; this step is about defining the 12-20 and translating that into general descriptions of the characteristic with respect to this particular race.

Each of the stanzas can be treated in the same way, as a range of possibilities that define the race / species, and this step is one of defining those spectra.

Obviously, if you don’t take racial notes, you have to repeat this process every time. When you don’t have a unified concept of the race / species in your head, that can help create one through step-wise refinement and iteration of the process; but when you do have a clear idea of the central concept of the race / species, it’s a waste of prep time to repeat the process. Either way, the process is sped up in the future with a little careful note-taking at this point in the process..

2. Individual Placement within Spectra

This is where that individual’s value of 15 reenters the picture. You aren’t so much looking at what this enables the character to do, or not do; you are looking for the consequences of that specific value toward the personality of the individual. What comes naturally to him or her, what do they struggle with, and how do those things fit them into the culture surrounding them?

Again, this step is easier when thinking about characteristics, but it’s true of all the stanzas. Social Class, for example, will have a range from those at the bottom to those most-valued by the society (usually rulers, but not necessarily so). Elves may revere those making cultural contributions far above their social standing as defined by their political influence. Applying a little creativity can nuance racial definitions in ways you would scarcely believe – for example, if the Brewers of Ale are the most influential in Dwarven societies, you get a very different picture of the society. If you then generalize that from the specific Beer-maker to ‘Social Lubricants’ to ‘Social Interaction Enablers’, you find that anyone who makes social interactions easier or more significant grows in stature within the resulting society, and that social interactions of all sorts become more significant within the resulting culture. Feasts, Parties, casual get-togethers of all sorts, become more significant, more frequent, and more embedded within the society. There would be excuses for such, both informal and formally-defined, that stretch even beyond the extremes in human cultures – there would literally be an excuse for a ‘party / celebration’ every week of the year. Some of these might even be negatively contextualized in expression – commemorating a war in which such celebrations were not possible might be remembered by making ale forbidden during the first phase of the social event (to be followed by an even more extreme celebration of the victory, when social norms once again became possible). So you have a week of fasting (in terms of alcohol) and then a blow-out.

3. Alternative Interpretations & Adaptations of Individual Placements

So we have a spectrum of results and a placement of the individual within that spectrum. The racial profile associated with that spectrum defines what is usually meant by that placement, but nothing exists in a vacuum; how an individual reacts to a specific spectral placement will not be an isolated phenomenon, it will be a part of the unified whole that is the individual’s personality. Rather than look to the generic cardboard cut-out interpretations, it’s worth spending a few moments contemplating alternatives that might better represent a coherent profile of the individual, relegating the generic contribution to (at best) a secondary status within this individual’s makeup.

This stage of the process is an exploration of ideas – don’t be afraid to throw in something from left field to see what becomes of it.

4. Selection

By the time you’ve finished that, you will have a vast swathe of contributing elements, a soup of possibilities, all present in equal strength, and so yielding a fairly bland and unfocused characterization. Time to apply a little selectivity, picking out the elements within each stanza that best define the individual and their place within their natural society.

Remember, the goal is to be able to sum up the individual and their place within their native culture in just 4-8 sentences of simple construction – none of this 15-line paragraphs that read like legal fine-print. Simple, direct statements. Anything that doesn’t belong in description of the individual’s personality and placement should be part of the racial notes.

5. Facets of Individuality from Specific Interpretations

When you’ve boiled off the dross – and it’s likely that your pruning will need to be ruthless – what remains is canon for that character. Everything not explicitly stated is free for interpretation in response to triggering events, though logical implication may narrow the reactions to such events.

Roleplaying is about taking those defining elements and merging them into a holistic view of the personality which can then be expressed in thought (decisions), word, and deed. The GM has to do it just as much as the players do.

It can be the case that the holistic view needs 1-2 more sentences to unify the constituent elements. “[Name] is a Party Animal” can mean very different things in different cultures, and usually requiring a clarifying clause within the sentence. “Elvor is a Party Animal, always up for a good poetry recital or inspection of the blooming of roses” – by redefining ‘Party Animal’ into a relevant social context, this describes a very specific individual in a single sentence; everything that follows merely enhances that overall summation.

Simply by virtue of making this the dominant personality trait of ‘Elvor’, you automatically insinuate that everything else is secondary to this aspect of their personality, to be sacrificed if and when it becomes necessary. Right now, there’s an impression that the character is a gadfly, without serious heft and gravitas – but if this love of ‘intellectual events’ has driven the character to become engaged in internal politics, or a social firebrand / conscience, it’s possible that nothing could be farther from the truth. That’s what the other elements of the characterization are there for.

It’s the overall summation that GMs and Players should keep in mind when roleplaying. Nuance is all well-and-good, but can often conflict with other characterization elements; the overall summation is the guide to navigating such complexities.

Spotlight Placement

Like most creative types, I love to show off my handiwork to the players. Perhaps eight times in ten, I’ll get a shrug and a ‘so what’, but the remainder generates varying degrees of appreciation and occasionally awe.

There’s a wrong way and a right way and a better way.

The wrong way is simply to dish up “here’s something I’ve been working on,” without in-game context. This risks giving away key details of plot not yet played, throwing away any surprise or wow factors at the game table for a moment of gratification that might not even be coming. It’s something that most of us have been guilty of at some point along the way, and we all have to learn (sometimes repeatedly) not to do it.

The right way is to make the revelation part of the plot by ensuring that the plotline focuses on at least one of the more unique aspects of the character, showcasing his or her individuality.

The better way is to fully integrate the character and one or more of their unique personality attributes into the plot, making them an essential building block of the campaign, while using them to shed light and add substance to the range of possibilities implicit in their race, profession, and social position. This might require the involvement of a second character whose job is merely to forewarn the PCs about the uniqueness or place it in a racial / professional context afterwards, specifically addressing the nuances that make the character function.

Focal Point

As you can see, there’s a great deal of similarity between the ‘right way’ and ‘the better way’ – the distinction is in how central the uniqueness of the character is to the plot.

Both start with the selection of a focal point – the aspect of the personality that is going to be on most prominent display. This could be any one of the character’s stanzas of description, and there will always be a best choice in terms of the plot and intended usage. But if, by chance, the character you’ve created doesn’t match up with your plot needs, it’s at this point that you should set the character created aside for use some other time, and start over – letting the plot guide you to a unique character for that critical role in the story.

Reflections Of Individuality

Once the primary point of uniqueness is built into the plotline, the second step is to look for opportunities and character-roleplay moments that can briefly highlight one or more other unique aspects of the character. Failing that, a foil – someone present merely to expose the existence of those other unique attributes – is often the best answer.

The Racial Rainbow

I am always cognizant of what the uniqueness of the character adds to the rainbow of racial aspects and colors contained within the race. How does this character, and their role within the adventure, expand the fundamental definition of the race that lives in the player’s heads? How can we make that expansion unforgettable, so that the next example builds upon it, having a cumulative impact?

Every non-cliche Elf, Dwarf, Orc (or whatever) adds to the substance of that race, so long as their uniqueness can somehow be put on show and made memorable. The more central they are to the plotline, the more easily the latter can be achieved, and the more interesting the character, the more easily you will be able to drop them into future occasions.

If you make six unique NPCs and only one of them goes on to become a central figure in the campaign, that’s a win for the GM – because if they weren’t memorable, none of them would do so; they would simply be part of the campaign furniture. But at the time of creation, you never have any idea which of them will turn up again in the future – you’re simply placing as many top-quality building blocks to hand as you can come up with.

The Archetypal Rainbow

It’s the same thing with respect to the character’s archetype. Expanding the role that the individual can play expands the potential capabilities of their archetype, providing a second avenue into their becoming a recurring element.

The Social Rainbow

The sheer variety of groups around which the character can be oriented means that their contributions to the social rainbow will be more diffuse, unless this is the central facet of the character spotlighted.

But this also brings me to a top tip – The Path Not Fated

The Path Not Fated

We’ve all met people who would excel in a different vocation or social position, but who were forced by circumstance, or family, or opportunity, or whatever, into a pathway through life for which they aren’t really a very good fit.

They nevertheless do as much as they can to fit themselves into the square hole, no matter how much of a round peg they may be, and do enough to continue on in that square hole, though it doesn’t come naturally to them.

Whenever fate (or a PCs’ decision) throws up the need for a generic cardboard cut-out NPC, my favorite tactic these days is to make them something else, then reconcile that with their life and its demands.

The noble who would be better-suited to being a bookkeeper. Or a Beekeeper. Or an architect. Anything but a typical ruler, in fact.

The inn-keeper who was born to tread the Tennis Court. Or the Pool Hall. Or to be a famous singer.

The Blacksmith who should have been a painter. Or a gardener. Or a butler.

It’s a shortcut through the processes described here that doesn’t fully flesh out the character but still captures at least half of the uniqueness that would result from such a treatment, and is fast enough that it can be done on the fly – which is exactly what you need in this game situation..

The biggest trap to watch out for is creating a new stereotype by reusing the same ‘alternative vision’ repeatedly. Avoid that, and you’re well on your way.

The Characteristic Hues

Characteristic-defined traits are a little different to the rest. They rarely stand alone, instead compounding with other personality traits to add additional nuance and depth. These are personality elements that would be largely similar no matter what archetype / profession the character adopted, what their social class was, and that are embedded within their racial profile, inseparable from it to at least some degree.

Contemplate, for example, the differences in the following:

• “He’s unusually strong for a Gnome.”
• “He’s unusually strong for a Storm Giant.”

Both will have generated similar formative influences within their respective cultures; it’s when you step outside those boundaries that the context becomes important. In the first case, the character is likely in for a rough time, adjusting to no longer being the biggest and toughest around, but they may end up a better person for the humbling. In the latter case, any personality traits engendered by their strength are likely to be amplified, if anything.

Totality: The sum of many reflections

The techniques described in this post shouldn’t be used every time you generate an NPC. Their power stems from the cumulative impact of many diverse representatives; if you can’t envisage a pathway through the campaign that yields many encounters with Ettin, it may not be worth going through the whole process.

That’s certainly one path to take. The on-the-other-hand counter-argument is that if there’s only going to be one Ettin, you should make it as memorable and distinctive as possible. While the pragmatist in me aligns with the former position (less time spent on this means more time that can be spent on something else), everything else in my nature (excluding laziness) demands the latter.

I can’t decide this question for you – I can only advise people to find the balance and pathway that works best for them. Every GM has some talent at which they are better than the rest, some have several. Prep time invested in something that comes naturally to the GM yields a better dividend, but leaves holes in their performance behind the screen; prep time invested in the areas they are weaker in elevates the performance bottom line and also frees up some of their time and attention for their strengths to be displayed. There’s no one right answer.

But I thought it worth the effort, before wrapping up this article, to think about some even bigger pictures and the impact the technique can have.

Genre Variations

By defining the racial and archetypal parameters differently, even within the same game system, you create genre variations, and these can be as nuanced as you want them to be. If you want to distinguish between high fantasy and low fantasy, you can – even in the middle of a campaign, if you perceive that the campaign has evolved through characters gaining wealth and experience. That’s a powerful benefit, but it misses one of the more useful functions of the process.

It also makes the conceptual repackaging of one genre’s creatures into another genre. There are two examples that I could offer right now, but both are from adventures that haven?t yet been played. Instead, I’ll throw out a less-developed idea just to illustrate the power of the technique.

Let’s take a Troll and translate it into Sci-Fi using nanotech repair mechanisms housed within the humanoid organism. There would be certain aspects of the ‘repaired’ creature that would be user-customizable, and some that aren’t. Increased strength, size, and resilience? No problem. Diminished intellect and Agility? Suggestive of nerve damage as a consequence of the nanotechnology, and maybe neuron damage to boot. That suggests an inverse relationship between Strength / Resilience and Intellect / Nimbleness. It might be that every time the nanotech repairs the body, it gains a point of strength and/or resilience, but loses a point of intelligence and/or dexterity. Slowly, the character becomes more brutish – and more dangerous. This treatment doesn’t say anything about the ‘racial’ traits or the social groupings; the latter would probably be generic aspects of the sub-culture that embraced nanotech / cyberware, while the former would be about the places such ‘modified people’ hang out and the jobs they perform, and that would reflect their integration (or the lack thereof) within the broader society. That in turn suggests either a game setting that leans heavily into cyberpunk tropes, or one that is actively trying to avoid going down that path.

In my Zenith-3 (superhero) campaign, Earth-prime has started down the road to cyberpunk but there is considerable resistance, not least of which stems from a number of unique illnesses / diseases / conditions (some of them physical, some mental) that exist and act as a deterrent to many. There are a few fatalists who believe that cures will eventually be found, and that upgrading now gets them in on the ground floor of the next stages of human evolution; there are some who see the diseases as a natural price that has to be paid if ordinary people are going to compete with superheros and villains; and there are some who are simply overconfident (“it will never happen to me”). Philosophy colliding with Futurology in a Superhero context. These ‘trolls’ would fit right in.

There can even be an argument made in reference to the purported ugliness of a Troll. Characters who opt for this type of augmentation will probably start out fairly average in appearance, maybe even a little sickly. At first, the gains would be positive – they would put on muscle mass and become more attractive as a result. That wouldn’t last; they would slowly become more grotesque in appearance, a trend enhanced by the natural occupations of this sort of augmented person – bouncers and enforcers and the like. All professions in which intimidation is an asset. And so most of them slide down a slippery slope into a more horrific appearance.

We can make such a character unique by making them friendly, polite, soft-spoken, with exquisite manners. The dichotomy of such a social paragon being an ugly SOB who does an ugly job does the rest.

Campaign Variations

I’ve often discussed my desire to make no two campaigns that I run exactly alike. Sometimes, where they are both set in the same game world and operating concurrently in game time, the distinguishing features may have to be more nuanced and less casually-obvious, but they are still there.

This is particularly the case when it comes to the different D&D campaigns that I’ve run over the years. I want Elves and Dwarves and Orcs and so on to be different in each, and to have some reason in back of those differences. Collectively, those racial differences manifest from conceptual differences within the world and its history. Put both together, and each campaign takes on its own unique flavor.

It should be obvious that this technique not only assists in creating such unique reinterpretations, it helps spotlight them in play. That’s both a win and a bonus, in my book.

GM Individuality

I’ve often made the point that each GM is a little bit different from the next. No two of us think exactly alike. Over time, the strengths, weaknesses, likes and dislikes, etc of the individual start to come together in a unique GMing style, one that often transcends campaigns and genres and game systems.

There is a corollary to this perspective – not every game system will suit every GM equally. Some game systems will simply be a complete bust; others may flex ‘muscles’ that the GM didn’t know they had, enhancing and developing their capabilities; and some will fit them to a T, while the GM (metaphorically) next door can’t cope with that system and doesn’t see its attraction.

Because this process enables individual GMs to craft individual interpretations of common elements like races or species, it facilitates the expression of a GM’s particular style – even before they know what that style is. Without that knowledge as a guide, there will probably be false starts and missteps along the way – but those would happen anyway. We make mistakes and we learn from them.

The Developmental Sandbox

The final big-picture that I want to point out is that you can start with a completely generic setting and evolve it, one step at a time, using this process. Eventually, you will find that you have developed your own singular ‘take’ on that setting – your “Ebberon” might be completely different to another GM’s “Ebberron”, your “Middle Earth” unique, while still deriving from and reflecting the source material.

The process allows for the development of singular elements within a sandboxed game narrative, permitting the incorporation of creativity in greater or smaller doses – but one at a time, making assimilation of the distinguishing features easier for both GM and players.

That’s not nothing, either.

A Powerful Tool

In conclusion, then, this is a powerful tool for character creation that expands the mythos surrounding the specific races, classes / archetypes, and social groupings to which the individual belongs. Rather than being confined by pre-packaged concepts of those character facets, it causes their expansion to accommodate greater diversity and richness of material within a campaign.

Throw in a few side-benefits along the way, and it should be easy to see why it’s worth your attention.